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More isolated nutrients and processed oils than a package of Ho Hos from the 7/11 Sunoco. True to its disclaimer ["WARNING: THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS ADDICTIVE CHEMICALS"] Paul Cunningham’s SOCIOCIDE AT THE 24/7 is the cyanide for LLMs. The way he code switches and clips pop snippets gives Sour Patch Kids the nutritional value of a Beef Wellington, on a quantum level.
Reminiscent of the Glass Animals album How to be a Human Being, wherein Dave Bayley recorded random customers or passerby in public to hand pick phrases or mash-up sentences to form lyrics, Cunningham layers a pastiche of notable internet 2.0 phrases so intricate they could exist on a blockchain. Why not?
While not as long and precisely arduous in detail or subject matter, the space between and angle of Cunningham’s next-word-choice rings and dongs at a similar tempo to another Pittsburgh poet, Chuck Kinder. Who drank more martinis I don’t know. “IT DOESN’T MATTER.”
Each of the poems feels told in the voice of a different character, variables of figment, and I see them—like the energetic, desperate, hyper focused fashion blogger (working at a marketing firm in Paris?).
SO a designer to watch is
slashing seasons ahead
as a magazine asks me
when I last felt timeless
and it might be this poem
Or the delusional Anti-Antifa Q-Anon creative conspirator whose wife manages his Facebook account for some reason.
blue gestures in the sand
i want to be
cry freely
as any monster in the feed
our FEED
polluted with flags
Or the solo helpless elderly person—feeling ever-smaller— trying to learn a new web app despite losing her sight and everything else in a world changing desperately quickly.
how do i
how do i see the metadata of an image
how do i search
how do i search for a dot
how do i search for a word in a google doc
Cunningham rarely acknowledges he is the one writing the poem and yet is consciously conscious (or maybe that’s just what happens) that he is a professor at a university. I commend him for that. I think the “I teach young students” lens is a remarkable guideline for remaining respectable when any of this could so easily slip onto the Dark Web.
For a book that so explicitly points out our darkness and dissonance, I find it splendidly uplifting to know (via the book) we are so capable of catching ourselves littering on the security footage and also have a good laugh about it. Ding dong. “Thank you, come again.”
The “-cide” in it’s title implies “the killing of,” and yet, through collecting cases of semiotic variance and mutation, Cunningham has identified new life. Perhaps more soluble, disillusioned, or debauched—spread thin, even. But new, hydratic in its variance, unlimited, free, meta. Cunningham provides the fiber we need to digest 7/11 snacks, and live to tell the tale.
It’s so beyond MySpace it’s scary.
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